“The @USGSA IT team just saved $1M per year by converting 14,000 magnetic tapes (70 yr old technology for information storage) to permanent modern digital records,” the post reads.
While the move may at first seem like a logical decision to modernize government services, critics were quick to point out the benefits of magnetic tapes over digital. The post by DOGE features a Community Note highlighting a few reasons to use magnetic tape, including the fact that they can store data much more efficiently and offer a physical “airgap” so that data cannot be stolen by cybercriminals.
Back in 2020, IBM published an article explaining that as the amount of data stored on the internet balloons year after year, large companies and educational institutions have turned to tape-based storage for archival purposes. “In terms of costs, storing data on tape is pennies per gigabyte and when not in use, tape requires no energy unlike hard disks and flash,” the company wrote. “Put simply, tape-stored data ensures that cloud providers will have the data they need when they need it. In addition, when stored properly, data recorded on tape today will still be readable in 30 years.”
Anyone who has been on the internet knows the frustration of old websites and social networks going offline, effectively wiping out vast amounts of human creation in one fell swoop. Some organizations like the Internet Archive have stepped in to help preserve websites before they are lost to time, but one organization can only do so much. Link rot, as it is called, is in effect a consequence of storage costs, but magnetic tapes are dirt cheap. The average magnetic tape today can store around 15 terabytes of data, but IBM says that new tapes it has been developing could store up to 580 terabytes. Contrary to what DOGE said in its post, tape technology continues to get better.
Cloud servers, meanwhile, are costly to operate, and hard drives, in general, can last up to five to ten years. Major companies like Meta and Google use RAID backups to prevent data from being corrupted and lost, but again, that is expensive. It is kind of ironic that a team tasked with lowering costs in the government may be doing the exact opposite with this move.
And also, in a sense, the phrase “permanent digital records” is an oxymoron. Digital is inherently ephemeral—it is why some people still prefer having physical copies of their media. A service shuts down and your digital memories go with it. XKCD years ago created an image that explains the frustration succinctly:
People often joke about how the government uses legacy technology, but there is a reason. If it works, maybe do not try and fix it.
